MULTIMEDIA

Charcoal-Liquid Oxygen Reaction Spotlighted In New Slo-Mo VIDEO

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What happens when you plunge red-hot charcoal into liquid oxygen? Watch for yourself in this fascinating slow-mo video, which is the latest installment of The University Of Nottingham's series, "The Periodic Table Of Elements."

When the charcoal hits the surface of the liquid oxygen -- boiling at room temperature -- the oxygen vapor kickstarts combustion and the charcoal catches on fire.

The chemists are at a bit of a loss to explain the physics underlying the reaction, but the result is pretty spectacular.

“The key point is that I, as a chemist, see that something that I thought was fairly straightforward is actually more interesting and more complicated than I thought," Dr. Martyn Poliakoff, chemistry professor at the university, says in the video.

In the late 18th century, King Gustavus III of Sweden was rumored to have carried out a strange experiment to determine the harmful health effects of coffee. Two identical twins who had been condemned to death had their sentences commuted to life in prison on the condition that one would drink three pots of coffee per day, and the other three pots of tea, for the rest of their lives. The only problem was that the doctors assigned to monitor the cases died before either of the patients did, their observations lost--as the story goes, the tea drinker died first, and there's no record of the coffee-drinker's death. The experiment proved nothing, suffering from a lack of rigor (to say the least).
Source: Uppsala University, "Coffee - rat poison or miracle medicine?"